Incidentally, I apologize for the slower-than-usual posting rate the past couple of days. I've been reading a book I just ordered off of Amazon-- no, I haven't gotten a pre-release copy of Quicksilver-- called Darlington's Fall.

It's really really good, but it's a little strange. I mean, how do you tell people (with a straight face) that you're reading this fascinating verse novel about a young lepidopterist in Indiana? I haven't found a way to do it without sounding really pretentious, which is unfortunate because the novel/poem is actually quite a smooth read. The author is my current obsession, Brad Leithauser (who John Updike regularly compares to that other lepidoterist's literary hero-- Vladimir Nabokov). Leithauser says in the introduction:

It's long, I know, for a poem (5,708 lines) but short for a novel (46,265 words, my computer tells me), and a novel's what I aimed to create here. I looked for dailiness and rootedness-- for verse with the firm calendars and solid place names, the ingrained habits and the incremental persuasions and erosions, which the novel has typically found congenial. I wanted specificity. Although all characters within these pages-- including the narrator-- are fictions, in nearly every case I've tried to get the science right. If the people are fabricated, I'd like to think the insects are genuine.)

A word about method, for those interested in verse mechanics. Having permitted myself rhymes that fall catch-as-catch-can, I vowed that nearly every line would have an exact, or perfect, rhyme. I 've eagerly made exceptions, though, for those irregular rhymes I often prefer to "perfection": especially rime riche (prays/praise) and pararhymes or rim rhymes (please/applause)...

Hands are hungry and with hungry hands
You must work extra hard to keep
Your wits about you, to be slow and quick
At once, as the situation demands.
(When you're so full of wanting, it's no small trick.)
Boil down all the trees in the forest until
They form a single cup of resin, still
You would never concoct a green
So bright, so dark, so dizzyingly deep
As this, the purest color he has ever seen

The online interviewing fad continues. Another Rice Grad has an interview with the CEO of Trupoker.com. Definitely worth reading for anybody interested in the game. (Incidentally for interviews with famous bloggers look to the 20 Questions sidebar on the right. For links to Howard Bashman's interviews with various judges, click here. Also, don't miss Kevin Drum's Paul Krugman interview.)

So a few weeks ago, Dear Prudence egregiously suggested that wedding hosts could demand money from their guests. This is wrong, not only because wedding hosts shouldn't be asking for gifts (of any sort) from their guests (presents are supposed to be "emotionally motivated") but also because wedding hosts shouldn't be presuming the existence of these gifts at all. Luckily, Prudie recognized the error of her ways and issued a retraction.

Sadly, Prudie has received a rather sickening firestorm of counter-retraction email from her readers, all of whom strongly believe that it's okay to ask for cash in one's wedding invitation. As I've said before, it's not. It's just not.

[This is not to say that just giving cash is impermissible. Like so many things in polite society, it's perfectly acceptable to give freely, just gauche to ask for it.]

Open call to readers. What drug policy blogs do you know about, or bloggers who blog about drug policy a decent fraction of the time? Please send me anything you can think of.

P.S. . . Keep your eyes peeled for an exciting entry into the blogosphere. That's all I can say for now.